6 Minutes
A night of spectacle: big winners and cinematic music moments
The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards returned to New York's UBS Arena with a show that felt part awards ceremony, part live concert film and part cultural referendum. Lady Gaga walked away as the evening's biggest winner, collecting four Moon Person trophies including Artist of the Year. Ariana Grande earned Video of the Year for her introspective visual project "brighter days ahead," while Sabrina Carpenter and Mariah Carey delivered some of the night’s most talked-about performances and moments.
From broadcast shifts to stagecraft
For the first time the VMAs aired on CBS in addition to MTV, signaling an unusual broadcast pairing that underlined both the ceremony’s legacy and the evolving business of televised music events. The production leaned heavily into cinematic staging: sweeping camera moves, carefully lit tableaux, and prerecorded elements that blurred the line between live performance and filmic music video. Those decisions reflected broader industry trends — as directors and choreographers increasingly treat music-video and awards-show segments like short films, emphasizing narrative and production design as much as choreography.
Major winners and what they mean artistically
Lady Gaga’s haul was a reminder of her sustained ability to fuse music and visual spectacle. Her four wins—spanning artistic scope and pop versatility—evoke earlier high points in her career when visual storytelling (think "Born This Way," the Chromatica era) drove cultural conversations as much as chart success. Gaga’s presence, including a brief in-person segment before jetting to her Madison Square Garden Mayhem Ball, reinforced how live concert films and tour visuals now intersect directly with award-season narratives.
Ariana Grande’s Video of the Year for "brighter days ahead" (also winner of Best Pop and Best Longform Video) was both intimate and cinematic, a document of healing that doubled as a longform music film. Grande framed the project as therapy-through-art: "This project is about all the hard work that is healing all different kinds of trauma... coming home to our young selves," she told the crowd. The win underscores a trajectory from pop singles to emotionally textured visual albums—an arc similar to other artists who have turned longform music videos into canonical works in the streaming era.
Sabrina Carpenter emerged as the night’s most provocative performer. Her single "Tears" leaned into a campy, grimy '90s New York aesthetic, with visuals and choreography that read like a slice of underground cinema. The performance was notable not just for its sensuality but for its politics: Carpenter’s stage featured drag performers and signs reading "Protect Trans Rights" and "In Trans We Trust." Her Best Album acceptance speech connected the spectacle to a message of resilience and inclusion.
Legacy acts and nostalgic filmmaking moments
The VMAs also doubled as a celebration of established artists and music-video histories. Mariah Carey finally received her first Moon Person after delivering a seven-song medley; Busta Rhymes received the Rock the Bells Visionary Award and reminded viewers of rap’s kinetic, cinematic potential. Ricky Martin was honored with the first-ever Latin Icon Award and gave a crowd-pleasing nod to the visual swagger of late-'90s pop.
A moving tribute to Ozzy Osbourne paired Yungblud with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, a rock-tribute sequence staged with the drama of a short concert documentary. Little moments—Kenny G’s cameo during Doja Cat’s retro opener and a Max Headroom-style interruption—felt like Easter eggs for longtime MTV viewers and music-video obsessives.
Remote performances, relevance, and production trade-offs
Several artists delivered beamed-in performances (Post Malone from Germany, Jelly Roll, and a remotely appearing Lady Gaga), a continuation of pandemic-era norms that have become normalized. While remote segments can dilute the electric energy of a live arena, they allow the awards show to roster global talent and hybridize the event into a broadcast that borrows from live television, concert film and streaming content.
"The VMAs are evolving into a format where music videos and live performances cross-pollinate with cinematic techniques," says cinema historian Marko Jensen, author of Pop Visuals: Music Videos and Film. "That hybrid is less a dilution than an acknowledgment that music and moving-image storytelling are now inseparable in mainstream culture."
Women dominated the night
Women won 24 of the VMAs’ 30 categories, reflecting pop music’s female-led moment and a landscape in which female artists are not only fronting songs but directing visual narratives, curating stagecraft, and shaping music documentaries and visual albums.
Context, criticism and cultural impact
Critically, the show was both a victory lap for pop’s visual ambitions and a reminder of award shows’ identity challenge: balancing safe broadcast-friendly moments with riskier, culturally urgent performances. Some viewers criticized the reliance on pre-taped material as evidence of waning live-tv relevance; others embraced the cinematic polish and accessibility for home audiences. The VMAs remain an index of how music video direction, production design and choreography inform broader pop culture and filmic aesthetics.
Trivia and behind-the-scenes notes
- Doja Cat’s opening number channeled 1980s production design and included a saxophonist cameo by Kenny G.
- Gaga’s tight timing—accepting an award before heading to Madison Square Garden—illustrates modern touring logistics where award-show moments must fit into global touring schedules.
- Mariah Carey’s Moon Person marked a rare late-career awards milestone and sparked celebratory fan reactions across social platforms.
Conclusion: VMAs as a living music-visual laboratory
The 2025 VMAs were less a retrospective than a laboratory: a place where music videos, live concert filmmaking and social commentary intermingle. For film and series enthusiasts, the show offered a reminder that visual storytelling in music now rivals episodic television for narrative depth and production ambition. Whether you watched for the awards, the costumes, or the stagecraft, this VMAs showed that the intersection of cinema and pop music continues to be a rich site for cultural storytelling—and a testing ground for new approaches to broadcasting, directing and performance.
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